Pages

Saturday, October 31, 2015

Kingsley
Amis’s The Alteration is one of
alternate history’s most notable texts.As with many British books, its concerns are largely centered on Old
Albion, particularly what the Isles would have been like were the Reformation
never to have occurred. A wonderfully-imagined possible intersection of
religion, politics, and culture, one can’t help but wonder the degree of its
influence on Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2002 alternate history The Years of Rice and Salt.A book that likewise pivots religious concerns on a single point in
history, Robinson removes Christianity and Judaism from the scene to focus on
the two major religions that remain, Islam and Buddhism.Published in the wake of 9-11, Robinson forgoes finger-pointing to build something of his re-aligned, Asiatic world.

The
first two major iterations of monotheism eliminated, The Years of Rice and Salt posits a Jonbar point wherein Black
Death wipes out 99% of Christendom and Judaism in Europe.In essence laying out the red carpet for
Islam to expand westwards and China eastwards, Robinson revisions the world to
be dominated by these two major powers.Not wholly a dichotomy, Hindustani India retains a toehold, and without
invading Europeans, so too does the Native American population.(Given extra years without European invasion
to disrupt the relative cultural and technological homogeneity, Robinson
envisions the tribes forming a loose but stable coalition that
evolves to a point it becomes a global player politically and commercially—an
interesting aspect, indeed.)

Thursday, October 29, 2015

There
is no doubt we are living in a second Golden Age of speculative fiction.The number of titles produced so high and
spread across such a variety of sub-genres, in fact, it’s impossible for anyone
to read all that comes available in science fiction and fantasy each month, let
alone year.Quantity not often equaling
quality, the bulk of new material is, unfortunately, superfluous.Where the majority of pulp from the 30s and
40s was lost to time, e-pulp of the current Golden Age is thus likely to go the
same direction.

This
is a long way of saying Daniel Polansky’s 2015 “The Builders” (Tor) is
e-pulp.It has color and punch, but so
quickly dissolves into nothing.Polanksy
himself calling the novella a “one-note
joke” derived from “adolescent
sensibilities,” his story of gun-slinging animals who get revenge on a
depraved city leader is as lite as speculative fiction gets.

Kung Fu Panda meets Mean Streets, “The Builders” features
Bonsoir the wisecracking French stoat, Boudica the doe-eyed sniper possum,
Cinnabar the quick-draw salamander, Barley the heavy-gunner badger, Gertrude mole,
and Elf the lame owl who team up under the cool, calm guidance of the Captain
(a disfigured mouse) to get their final revenge on evil Mephetic skunk.Bullets flying fast and furious against
hordes of rats and lackeys, the Garden will never be the same.

Take
the philosophical concept of the original Dune
trilogy, sprinkle in some basic plot devices from The
Lord of the Rings, and mix with a coherent system of magic, a handful
of strong lead characters shaded in gray, wholly original races, cultures, and
settings, and voila, you will have R. Scott Bakker’s Prince of
Nothing series in a nutshell. A lucid concoction, the trilogy holds
no punches, leaving the reader wide-eyed for its brutal adherence to the
realities of pre-industrial life and probing of the darker crevasses of the
human psyche. No fuzzy hobbits picking flowers and discussing what
variety of pipe tobacco they prefer, instead, Machiavellian scheming,
deep-seated fear, ever-inflating egos, and pushes, risks, and clashes to obtain
power are unveiled as ugly truths in humanity. Underrated, the Prince
of Nothing is one of the best epic fantasy series available today, The Darkness that Comes Before (2003)
its first volume.

The Darkness that Comes Before is a strong
trilogy opener. Patiently revealing bits and pieces of Earwa, giving the reader
strong, distinct characters to wrestle with, creating tension from the social
and political setup, developing a layer of intellectual depth to the underlying
motivations of the story, and most importantly, giving purpose to the overarching
narrative, there are few opening volumes in epic fantasy as successful.A critique of human fear and ego the series’
roots, Bakker’s narrative is appropriately character and dialogue based, but
should not be mistaken as a hero’s journey.It’s dark. In fact, the novel holds much more in common with Peter
Watts’ hardline views toward the human psyche in Blindsight than Tolkien’s The
Lord of the Rings silven elves and magisterial forests and mountains.Another way of saying this is, it’s epic
fantasy minus the good guys.

Monday, October 26, 2015

Pouncing
on the steampunk zeitgeist, Mark Hodder’s 2010 The Strange Affair of Spring HeeledJack takes the clockwork aesthetic and runs with it—as fast and
hard as it can.Victorian England, steam
horses, top hats and walking sticks, brass hovercrafts, Richard Burton (a la a Sherlock Holmes), the paranormal,
biological tinkering, cursing parrots, and a mystery involving a spring-loaded,
blue fire-breathing man on the foggy streets of London—it may be as overtly
steampunk as steampunk gets.

A
clear mix of Tim Power’s The Anubis Gates
and James Blaylock’s Langdon St. Ives
books with a lingering essence of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde, Hodder places Richard Burton, the famous
African explorer, front and center in an alternate history adventure of late 19th century British proportion.With
secret societies, late night escapades, eugenics, Dickensian street urchins,
spontaneously exploding werewolves, roto chairs, and time travel conundrums peppering
the mix, the devices and tropes leave no doubt as to its predecessors.

Saturday, October 24, 2015

Note: this review is for the novella
“Hawksbill Station” not the novel expansion.If you are interested in the novel, I recommend Joachim Boaz’s review, here.

Soviet
forced labor camps, located in the remotest depths of Siberia, define the word
‘exile’.As the titles (let alone
content) of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The
Gulag Archipelago and Gustav Herling’s A World Apart imply, life in the work camps was more than one degree separate
from civilization.Not just murderers
and thieves worked to the death in extreme conditions, the camps were likewise
home to political dissidents and subversives, which in conjunction with the
remote isolation, created a unqiue environment consisting of a much wider
variety of personalities than the average penitentiary in the West.Far from Siberia (quite literally) yet
similar in demographic, Robert Silverberg’s superb 1967 novella “Hawksbill
Station” takes a look at one such prison camp.

Time
travel the main plot device (though thankfully not one whose technicalities are
delved into in the least), a totalitarianist government uses a time machine to
ship its convicts millions of years into Earth’s past into the Cambrian
era.A one way trip, the men (and it’s
only men) are provided the basics of life—shelter, rudimentary technology,
etc.—and are left to fend for themselves, no hope of returning to the present
day.Mostly radical intellectuals and
political subversives, they resist the urge to resort to primitivism,
maintaining as relatively a civilized society as their meager means allow.Battling inner demons, Jim Barrett is the
informal leader of the misfit group that has slowly assembled over the years.
With his embracing view, his social glue is a big part of why their time-lost
colony still functions.But with the
arrival of a new prisoner, a young man calling himself Law Hahn, the relative
stability of Hawksbill Station threatens to crumble.

Friday, October 23, 2015

(For
a better genre view of West of Eden,
see MPorcius’ quality take here.)

Extreme
alternate history, West of Eden (1984) is a
version of Earth wherein the dinosaurs never went extinct and evolved in parallel
to humanity. I normally do not point to wikipedia, but in the case of this
novel it does a great
job summarizing the setting and how it’s different from what we know.

Featuring
sentient dinosaurs (called yilane) evolved to a bio/steampunk-ish level of
technology, they are set against a version of humanity not yet graduated from
the stone age.Having evolved on
separate continents, the opening of West
of Eden features the first meeting of the two species.Not going well to say the least, a cycle of
violence takes hold in the aftermath that threatens to make one side or the
other extinct.Caught in the middle is
Kerrick.A child at the outset, his
hunting party is slaughtered by the yilane and he is taken captive.Treated like a dog, he nevertheless learns
their language and becomes a part of their society as he grows up.But he never fully accepts his situation.
Harboring dreams of escape and vengeance, Kerrick gets what he wants, but
whether or not he’s satisfied is another question.

Superficially
genre, the imaginings of West of Eden
will either turn the reader on or off.Sentient dinosaur anthropoids the litmus test, if the idea causes no
eyelashes to bat, the text can be appreciated, as below the surface Harrison
has imbued his alternate history Earth with many pervasive and interesting
ideas.From primitive survival to
xenophobia, the effects of technology on a species and inter-species relations
to paganism, discrimination, and imperialism, it’s clear Harrison is telling a
story more concerned with the interplay of ideas than the wars and battles and
other trappings of mainstream science fiction that are so easily, and often
appealingly available to the eye.

Wednesday, October 21, 2015

Haley’s
Comet-esque, there are not many chances I have to praise a science fiction book
cover, so presented with the opportunity, I’m going to pounce.The cover of Jonathan Lethem’s 1994 Gun, with Occasional Music is not only a
nice piece of retro art, it represents the novel at all levels.(Feels strange writing those words...) The
surface is classic: the character expressions, the clothing, the mood, the
usage of lighting—it could grace the cover of a 1930s detective magazine and
none would be the wiser.Except—except
there’s that kangaroo, in a suit.Incongruous it may seem, yet indicative it remains.

Raymond
Chandler inviting Michael Swanwick and Philip K. Dick to his house for drinks
(or perhaps something a little harder, a little more psychedelic), Gun, with Occasional Music is classic
detective noir with a futuristic, surreal spin.While Lethem puts the majority of his effort (successfully) into getting
the right tone, the right structure, and the right character dynamics to match
the revered crime writer’s style, there remain enough evolved animals,
synthetic drugs, and other social and media oddities for the kangaroo to be
fully deserving of its place on the cover.

Monday, October 19, 2015

There are
the novels that everyone thinks of when the word ‘cyberpunk’ is mentioned: Neuromancer, Mindplayers, Hardwired,
and others.But it may be Bruce
Sterling’s anthology Mirrorshades
which best defines the
sub-genre.Capturing the spectrum of the
movement in artistic terms, the anthology covers aesthetics to ideology.Jeff and Ann VanderMeer’s 2008 anthology Steampunk does precisely the same with
the eponymous sub-genre.Likewise
featuring a representative range of stories with superb introductory and essay
material, it captures the next -punk in all its major forms, in essence
defining it.

Canvassing
the field, the VanderMeers came up with fourteen stories—or at least excerpts
from fourteen stories—in Steampunk.Like Mirrorshades,
most are recognizable to the sub-genre while a few are intended along
ideological lines.Airships, steam
horses, pulp nostalgia, alternate history, Victoriana, clockwork apparati,
plebian struggles, anachronistic machines, social revolutions—all are
represented in some form or another, most more than once.The authors well to lesser known, there is
not one story, however, poorly written.Certainly every reader will have their own opinion about what is and
isn’t steampunk, but the supplementary material—essays from Jess Nevins and
Bill Baker as well as story introductions (from the VanderMeers, assumedly)—go
a long way toward establishing a steampunk context that includes all the
material selected, and in the very least erects a scaffolding for what the
sub-genre might be.

Saturday, October 17, 2015

Hmmm… business is competition, right?And for the moment that competition is generally
peaceful, regulated by government institutions businesses dislike but accept.But what if business were above the
law—played by its own rules—and were allowed to openly invest in the weapons
and wars that support their profit lines?Wouldn’t this turn business into war and vice versa—a negotiation with
violence instead of diplomacy?And what
if, just what if, the position of CEO, winning of contracts, major decisions,
etc. were decided by car duels?And what
if—wait
a minute!Car duels?

It’s at
this point the writer faces Shakespeare: to include or not to include car
duels.Richard Morgan, in his 2004 Market Forces, decided ‘Yes, I want car duels to back my corporate
wars, and not only will there be car duels, there will be violent and
melodramatic car duels.’It’s
therefore a good thing he also decided to take the next necessary step and make
the novel satire.

Thursday, October 15, 2015

The 1950s
in the US was a time when science fiction and fantasy were emerging from their
cocoons to spread wings and take purposeful flight.Though they have never fully escaped this
legacy, the decade at least started to put some distance between itself and ray
gun wielding heroes, slavering aliens, and damsels in distress by looking at
how larger issues might be addressed by genre.Charles L. Harness’ collection The
Rose, anchored by the eponymous novella, is a bold step toward
adulthood.

Working
with the foundation of Oscar Wilde’s short “The Nightingale and the Rose”, “The
Rose” is the story of Anna van Tuyl.Ballet dancer, psychologist, composer, as well as recent grower of
strange bodily protuberances, she seeks help completing her most recent
symphony and runs into Ruy Jacques, a man who shares her problems
corporeal.Jacques’ scientist wife is
dragged into the mix, and with her come the 19 equations she is working on in order
to design the world’s perfect weapon.Their triangle eventually coming to a line, Harness falls back upon a
dramatic/comedic conclusion that satisfies all sides of the art vs. science
debate.

Monday, October 12, 2015

Apocalypse
has become one of the primary motifs of science fiction.Starting as early as H.G. Wells The War of the Worlds’ alien invasion,
it moves through the psychological examinations of humanity involved in
environmental catastrophe by J.G. Ballard in the 60s and 70s.It is in the 21st century, however, that one
sees the motif really take hold.Post-ap
texts a sub-genre of their own these days, the stories the past decade
utilizing end of the world scenarios are many, many.It’s precisely in this context Maureen
McHugh’s 2011 collection After the
Apocalypse becomes (ironically) so unique.

Hinted at
in the title (the eschewing of the standard term ‘post-apocalypse’ to relate
the same idea with different words), After
the Apocalypse is what Paul Kincaid mildly calls in his review “different ways of looking at how our future
has failed us.”The stories so
personal as to almost defy the social implications of the term ‘apocalypse,’ McHugh
focuses all of her attention on the human aspect of disaster, nearly, but not
quite, rendering the term immaterial.Containing nine stories, two of which are original to the collection,
McHugh’s unvaryingly understated usages of disaster are far more relevant to
emotion and human interest than the overwhelming majority of post-ap fiction,
i.e. that trying to capitalize on the zeitgeist or pure sensationalism.

Friday, October 9, 2015

Jane Tiptree Jr.’s 1990 His Smoke Rose Up Forever is a quality collection of short stories
spanning the writer’s career. Almost but not quite a best-of, its major themes
are brazen and challenging, including: alien juxtaposition, dominance in
cultural relations, gender dichotomy, mortality, and the female proclivity for
physical and sexual violence toward men.The language on point throughout, nihilism regarding humanity’s overall
chances of survival as a result of female misanthropy has never been so
rigorously portrayed in fiction.

Now
stop.Did you blink at anytime reading
that paragraph?Yes, I confess.I switched the gender indicators.Reverse all the male, female, etc. and voila, you’ve got a true summary of Her Smoke Rose Up Forever.Feel better now, don’t you?It’s ok for men to be the cause of humanity’s
downfall and to have their evil deeds magnified in heavily politicized terms,
but not ok for women.Thus, in terms of
the collection’s location in gender discussion, it makes for... interesting
discussion.

Though
there are some outliers (which I will get to), the lion’s share of Her Smoke Rose Up Forever is bound up in
men committing violence toward women, of male fantasies that end in rape or
murder, and of masculinity that plays itself into the downfall of humanity.“The Last Flight of Dr. Ain,” for example, features an epidemiologist (a
man) who travels the world giving lectures, spreading a virus along the way.
His reason: fantasies of a woman appearing in his dreams.“Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled
of Light!” is the story of a woman trodding a post-apocalyptic landscape and is
raped along the way.As she lays dying,
she dreams of a woman who is… raped.“With Delicate Mad Hands” is the story of a young woman who is assigned
to a space ship, and after some time aboard, is gang raped by her shipmates and
captain before a more tragic fate takes hold.And in perhaps Tiptree Jr.’s most famous story, “The Screwfly Solution,”
an entomologist researches eliminating a particularly pesky insect by creating
a pesticide that wipes out its females.In his life outside the lab, the entomologist has fantasies of murdering
his wife while a strange cult, the Cult of Adam, sweeps the land, killing all
women.

Wednesday, October 7, 2015

Brian
Ruckley’s debut TheGodless World trilogy got its foot in
the grimdark door a few years before the idea really took hold in epic
fantasy.Something of a misfortune for
Ruckley, his trilogy remains one of the better in the sub-genre, but under-read
due to the later success of George R.R. Martin, Joe Abercrombie, Luke Scull,
Jeff Salyards, Brian Staveley, and others.Possessing a strong Scottish-ish (or at least Medieval loch and
highlands) feel, Ruckley proved able to do something beyond plot and set
scenes: endow story and character with something resembling real emotion—not
something typically on the grimdark checklist.Moreover, his gritty style is more natural, more organic.Unlike the manipulations of Abercrombie or
the contrived cheese of Scull or Salyards, the fates of Ruckley’s characters
unravel inherent to plot rather than being insular events intended solely to
shock or surprise.Smaller in scope and
the emotional edge perhaps blunted slightly, Ruckley’s 2014 The Free marks a return to grimdark.

A
stand-alone novel (very welcome in this day of never-ending series), The Free is the story of a band of
mercenaries fulfilling one last contract and the young man who joins them as
contract bearer.That contract the
capture of a man who committed the most grievous of injustices against a small
village, the leader of the Free, Yulan, has personal interest bringing the man
down, and thus he and his motley group of clevers and battle-hardened fighters
go about the commission with teeth set.But when a nearby school of magic undergoes internal upheaval, a rogue
sorcerer throws a wrench in the Free’s plans.For Drann, the contract bearer, life goes from chaotic to outright
frightful as everything collides in a powerful climax that shakes and trembles
the story to its very foundations.

Monday, October 5, 2015

I recall
in high school an English teacher admonishing we students to invest in Strunk
& White’s The Elements of Style.I ignored her, of course, but years later,
when doing more writing than I ever intended as a teenager, picked up a copy at
a table sale, somewhere, for a quarter.Thinking to have a laugh, I opened it that night to see what my teacher had
been on about.Soon enough, I was
caught—“Yes, that’s it!” and “They’re completely right!” the
statements coming to my brain time and again reflecting on the problems with my
own writing.Having just finished Jeff
VanderMeer’s 2013 Wonderbook:The Illustrated Guide to Creating
Imaginative Fiction, I can’t help but imagine that if my high school
teacher had recommended it, my history would have been different.

There are
writing guides and there are writing guides.Some are for a specific purpose, e.g. Scott Meredith’s poison—ahem,
prescription for mainstream fiction Writing
to Sell, and some are to shore up specific issues a writer may have, such
as David Madden’s Revising Fiction.Threading the tight gap between
horn-rimmed glasses strictness and loose practicality, Wonderbook is, as VanderMeer writes in his intro, a “general guide to the art and craft of fiction
first and foremost, but it is also meant to be a kind of cabinet of curiosities
that stimulates your imagination.”Packed to the gills with gorgeous
illustrations, diagrams, and art (the striking cover is literally only the
beginning) as well as input from a wide range of authors, it aims to be
advisory, illustrative, engaging, insightful, and above all, informative.

Saturday, October 3, 2015

One of the main
characters in William Gibson’s Mona Lisa Overdrive is the titular Mona. A drug-addicted
prostitute wandering the Sprawl, she accepts an offer too good to be true, and
loses her identity in the process: the surgeries she undergoes confuse any
sense of self not already rattled by narcotics.Gibson’s novel classic cyberpunk, the gritty noir of near-future
permeates her story.Revisioning Mona,
Ian Hocking’s re-released Deja Vu
(2014, Unsung Stories) tells a
fast-paced cyberthriller about a young woman with a similar identity crisis.
His Mona, however, is agent of her own future.

Saskia
Brandt is Hocking’s Mona, and at the outset of Deja Vu is pressganged into a job she would rather not do but is
forced to take due to past decisions: she is to track down a murderer.Whisked away to London, she finds herself
paired with the cynical Jago, and together the two begin putting together the
pieces of David Proctor’s story.A
brilliant professor caught up in affairs over his head that result in the death
of a colleague, Brandt tracks Proctor at her own peril, and in the process
learns which past decisions haunt her today—and tomorrow.

Thursday, October 1, 2015

I’ve
bought Octavia Butler’s 1979 Kindred,
I’ve read it, I’ve greatly enjoyed it, but I don’t know if I’m in a position to
review it.A middle-aged white American
male, I can talk until I’m blue in the face about the importance of the novel
regarding black history in my country, but in the end, the most important thing
is that the reader switch windows to their favorite book seller’s site and
purchase the book to fully experience the text.Rich to the point of bursting with socio-cultural importance, the novel
ranks alongside the works of Angela Carter, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, and
other writers who have been key to giving the African American voice in
fiction.Tackling slavery, its legacy,
and contemporary race relations head on, Kindred
gives pause in a multitude of ways.

Like the
best works of speculative fiction, Kindred
uses genre tropes as a springboard to something grander.Though technically a time travel story,
Butler never goes into the details of shifting characters back and forth in
time.Dana Franklin, a contemporary
American black woman, and her husband Kevin, a white man, are taken through
bizarre temporal shifts to the American south circa 1815—the heart of of nearly
every kind of racial injustice and oppression one can imagine.The pair finding themselves on the plantation
of Dana’s great-grandparents, owned by one Rufus Weylin, they must live through
the nightmare of slave life from a 20th century perspective.